The present invention relates in general to personal communication systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods and apparatus for executing an application function across a network.
The mobile nature of today's workforce makes it often difficult to securely take advantage of internal network resources and applications when workers are away from their desks. One common communication technique may be email. Used throughout the enterprise and across organizational boundaries, email is used to communicate and request information or action.
Much like the telephone for voice communication, email has been adopted as a primary application for business, in particular for both remote and mobile access. In the enterprise, email tends to be the primary business communication platform and, hence, is almost always open on a user's desktop. It also tends to be the primary application for wireless users.
Email was originally developed as an electronic extension to regular physical mail, and as such is principally asynchronous and freeform. Asynchronous generally means that a process (e.g., sending an email) operates independently of other processes (e.g. receiving an email), whereas synchronous means that the process runs only as a result of some other process being completed or handing off operation (e.g., voice telephone conversation). An email message is generally composed by a first user, and sent to a second user, where it is queued in the second user's inbox to be subsequently read and possibly responded to at a later time. Freeform refers to the relatively small amount of standardized information in an email message. That is, aside from a few fixed fields (e.g., destination address, origin address, and subject etc.), the majority of the email document itself comprises the content or body. This is comparable to a physical mail message which generally only requires the destination address.
The person-to-person nature of email generally makes it not useful for access network resources (e.g., databases, sales tools, etc.) that require more sophisticated client applications with more robust user interfaces, such as a web browser. That is, errors are generally indicated by human readable text that is relatively freeform and not standardized, making it hard for program to program communication. In addition, many mobile wireless devices (e.g., cell phone, PDA, etc.) are relatively small, and hence problematic for the remote access of internal network resources. Current enterprise software platforms were not originally deployed for this type of access, and so often require significant development, implementation and management expenditures to support access from these wireless devices.
Mobile devices generally present the user with a relatively poor user interface for applications other than voice, because of both battery duration and form-factor requirements. Although receiving messages is easy, with the exception of voice, small displays and keyboards make transmitting messages awkward and problematic. For example, sending a text message may take a substantial effort because of the relatively small size mobile keyboards. In addition, devices without full keyboards (such as the numeric keypads on most cell phones) practically restrict data transmission to short messages (e.g., SMS, etc.).
Screen size also tends to limit the use of conventional client/server applications and browsers. Existing applications and web-sites generally do not work with the small screens on mobile devices despite attempts at screen panning or automatic conversion from HTML to WML. Some vendors have chosen to write new versions of their applications or web-sites especially for the mobile worker but this is non-trivial (one screen must become many mobile-screens) and therefore expensive to implement. Also, there is a lack of portability standards for mobile software and given the variety and rapid development of devices at the present time we should not expect to see this situation improve soon.
In view of the foregoing, there is desired an architecture for general purpose trusted personal access system and methods therefor.